Our satellite communicator beeps as the green light flashes to signal a new message: ‘Big 90km/h winds and blizzard forecasted in town today. Build a snow wall,’ reads the text from our friend in Iqaluit, 150km south of our camp. Cozy inside our red tunnel tent, two stoves melt snow for the day. I warm my fingers curling them around my mug of hot chocolate. The tent fabric flaps lightly.Travel has been great; we are ahead of schedule, the weather is cold and calm, and the dogs are happy. St

When she started climbing, Heather Geluk pretty much epitomised every ‘real’ climber’s worst prejudices of the commercial climbing client. No experience, no idea how to put on crampons, no understanding of the lore of alpinism or Himalayan climbing. Just a paying client tethered to a guide on the slopes of Mera, a 6,400m peak in the Nepal Himalaya. Heather had just been dumped by her boyfriend, but instead of booking a beach holiday and drowing her sorrows in a bar serving strawberry daiqu

Swirling wind whipped our shelter with a ferocity I had not encountered before. The tunnel tent swayed helplessly within the maelstrom. It was 3.00am and I had not slept a wink. The noise of flapping nylon, and then the partial suffocation as the walls leaned in for a long pause over my face, made it impossible to focus on anything but the storm. I never doubted the equipment, but I was extremely aware of the agitated rustling from my girlfriend’s sleeping bag as she lay next to me. She was

Our third day in the expansive wilderness of the Brooks Range found us returning from an afternoon hike to the domed pingo visible from our camp on the banks of Noatak River. Trekking alongside us were Jim Slinger and Andrew ‘Tip’ Taylor, two men with whom we’d exchanged emails over the past few years but only now were getting to know on a more personal level. The hike provided a much-needed opportunity to stretch our legs and break away from where we’d been tethered, waiting for the plane t

At 4,000m, the sun was penetrating, loosening rock and ice. Gleaming chains of peaks ran in every direction and faded into the horizon. Above me, a raptor floated on thermals, silhouetted against the blue, whilst below me, glacial lakes were turquoise gems set into the platinum landscape. In the silence, I could hear my heart pounding. In Sanskrit, Manaslu means ‘Mountain of the Spirit’ and in this place, where heaven and skies meet, the thin air seemed imbued with an otherworldly spirit. A

In Sidetracked Volume Seven, Anna Frost tells her story of returning, with only fragmented memories, to Papua New Guinea – nearly 3 decades after her family had left – to run and explore the Highlands. Dean Leslie followed her journey. Anna Frost, or ‘Frosty’, is an instantly recognisable face to anyone who follows the small world of trail and ultrarunning. The athlete has a friendly smile, an infectious enthusiasm and an incredible winning record. It is, therefore, disarming to see her bre

June 30th, 2015: time is running out. Day five of a week-long expedition and the too-swift current still carries considerable risk. The Aegean Sea is a magical turquoise that inspires a vision of Neptune rising, but that tranquil scenery belies what is happening beneath us. Placement of our diving vessel, the U-Boat Navigator, is crucial and we cheer as the mark we are waiting for appears on the sonar. We are directly above the wreck of the HMHS Britannic, Titanic’s sister ship, sunk by a Ge

This is the second in our foraging and wild cooking series exploring different landscapes and ingredients within the UK. To follow the routes and for more ideas, visit Viewranger.com.  Mist still clings to the ivy-twined walls bracketing our car as we ease carefully through the narrow lanes of Devon. Passing through one small village, I sense little change in the landscape or pace of life from when I last lived and worked in this neck of the woods over a decade ago. The rumble of tyres over

I lie on the operating table in a tiny, rural Vietnamese hospital. The room is dimly lit, with dark red splotches covering the wall on my left. The young nurse diligently stitches the three-inch gash on my right arm, though the tools she uses don’t look sterilised. She speaks no English – matching my proficiency in Vietnamese. My motorcycle is totalled after a high-speed collision with a stray dog fulfilling an apparent death wish. I have less than $20 on me and my phone is about to die. Th

On February 6th, Ines Papert and Mayan Smith-Gobat, accompanied by their photographer friends Thomas Senf and Franz Walter, summited Torres Central, in Torres del Paine National Park (Chile) via the extremely difficult east face. Twenty-five years after the first ascent of this historic route, this was only the fifth known successful ascent of ‘Riders on the Storm’. This region is famous for its unstable weather conditions, making it a very challenging place to climb. In Sidetracked Volume

In March this year, five amateur rowers set two world records after becoming the first team to row unsupported from mainland Europe to mainland South America. Oliver Bailey recounts their final day, navigating through Venezuelan waters renowned for drug trafficking and piracy. The final 24 hours of our record-setting trans-Atlantic row were the most memorable. For the first time in 50 days I could differentiate tones other than the blue-grey hues of the sky and the ocean. When I exited the

We run through the darkness. It wasn’t meant to be this way. I feel stronger than I have done all day, as we move in silence under shadowy giants. The cool of the night has rejuvenated me, and I find flow where before there was only suffering. Occasionally, the gathering storm clouds clear long enough for the silhouette of Monte Rosa, our constant companion for the last two days, to frame us. Moonlight and headtorches glint off each irregularity and imperfection in the trail in front of us.

Sidetracked: When you were 21, you hitchhiked from Cairo to London via Baghdad. In Israel, a bomb went off and the borders were closed to all but Jordan. In Jordan, you couldn’t afford to fly out and the only other border you could cross was into Iraq. What on earth happened there? Levison: That was my third year at university, in 2003. It was the summer break, and a friend and I went to Egypt with the intention of travelling around Israel and then taking a boat to Greece to spend the summe

Sidetracked: A recent article profiling you said the catalyst for Waves For Water was you trying to figure out your next move. You were fading from professional surfing and spending more time riding motorcycles through Baja and hiking in the mountains, wondering what to do with your life. Can you tell us a little more about that time? Jon: I was a pro surfer for 13 years and I turned pro straight out of high school. I was on tour for about six of those years; the rest was spent pro freesur

Perched on the gunwale of a fishing boat I watched rain dancing on the water. At my side was Seumas, my best friend, who had flown from Scotland to join me in perhaps the only place on Earth wetter and windier than home. Catching a fleeting glance beneath his hood we shared the same unspoken thought: What are we doing here? Famous for a record 9m and 361 days of rain per year, Puerto Eden felt like a lost temperate rainforest in the heart of Patagonia’s ice-capped wilderness. These humble ho

Kiwiland, or ‘Skiwiland’ as New Zealand’s Southern Alps quickly became known, is home to big wild mountains, snowy ridges and elegant ice arêtes, so it’s no wonder that native Edmund Hillary was the right man to ‘conquer’ Everest with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Rapidly changing weather and depressions bring incessant gusty wind, and the southwesterly storms roll in heavily laden with moisture falling as snow over the high ground. There is nothing but ocean between the South Island and Antarctica

After two weeks, a patch of blue sky appeared through the swirling morning mist. By the afternoon the sun was out and we were being bitten by a thousand ravenous mosquitoes. Given the loss of time, we decided to concentrate on two big walls near camp. So far, exploration on Baffin, such as it was, had focused on exploring and making first ascents by easy routes. We now hoped to do something never before attempted in Arctic Canada and climb one of the big granite faces around us. Guy and Phil

I live in a land of contradictions. Scotland is fiercely independent, but not quite willing to go it alone; it is tiny, but home to a landscape and culture that speak far beyond its borders. In summer I tramp up and down hills, but in winter I stand with trepidation at the feet of mountains. Although we frequently look south from here as the sun withdraws and the seasons turn, we lose our grip on the land and it looks northwards to the cold, the wind and the silence of winter skies. Those o

After venturing deep into the Sinai desert in the dead of night, I lay down completely exhausted by travel and collapsed into a drug-induced coma. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, I awoke to the familiar sound of the ‘Call to Prayer’. I was about to witness a landscape that would captivate me for many years to come. As I stumbled barefoot across the freezing sandy floor with my Bedouin blanket wrapped tightly around me there was an eerie silence in the air and every sound was muffle

In medieval folklore, a mythical island known as Ultima Thule was foretold in the north. It was a land beyond the borders of the known world, guarded by an element neither sea, nor land, nor sky – it was guarded by icebergs. Since first learning of Lago Geike in my first guiding season on the Rio Serrano it had become a personal obsession, my own Southern Ultima Thule. Each trip I led, I passed the murky brown outwash where trees lay swept from a horizon of rock and ice, tantalisingly dista